It’s about time (travel)

[Editor’s note: Andrea White is the author of three children’s books – Surviving Antarctica, Window Boy, Radiant Girl and the upcoming Time Cops. She’s also the wife of Houston Mayor Bill White. She also blogs at PassionateSupporter.com]

Julie Soefer photo

Author Andrea White

One of the best things about writing young adult fiction is creating new worlds. The inspiration for a new world often comes from unexpected places, a photo I see on the Internet, a picture I see in my mind when I close my eyes to imagine, or a real life person.

When creating a new world, I’ve learned that the new one needs enough of the old so that it doesn’t feel too crazy. The reader’s world has to be a jumping off point, or they can’t bridge into the new world. At the same time, the new world has to offer something unique and vivid to engage people and motivate them to keep turning the pages.

Right now I’m working on a book about time travel. Actually, I’ve been engrossed in this book for so long that I’ve managed to make a large amount of time travel right by!

While characters are the heart of any story, I’ve been learning about and figuring out how to stay consistent with different time travel principles. Take the Grandfather Paradox. If you go back in time, change events, and your biological grandfather never meets his wife to produce one of your parents, how do you even exist to travel back in time?

Thinking about that one gives me a time travel headache.

Or the Butterfly Effect when a seemingly minor event can result in significantly different outcomes. This can create some fascinating “what if” scenarios for a fiction writer and real moral questions for the reader exploring the new world. If you go back in time, does it matter if you change things? Should you?

My characters have differing points of view on time travel rules. But one thing they agree on (because I’m so passionate about it) is that every second matters. I think the most devastating thing we could ever do with time is waste it.

I can sit for hours thinking about how if I were to go back in time to try to change something, it wouldn’t work because future me has already tried that and obviously the outcome was what had happened in the past.

Thanks, John. I find this stuff really hard and am not comfortable with it like you seem to be. My central idea is that there is a group of people who want to keep history exactly the same, the Time Fundamentalists, vs. a group who want to change history to reduce human suffering, the Time Designers. The philosophical question is: can man through his actions reduce the amount of suffering in the world? Have a great weekend and thank you for the suggestions.

“The Door Into Summer” is truly one of the best time-travel stories ever written. I read it first as a child before I understood what the sexual themes were all about, and then as an adult the book meant something totally different to me. Heinlein had the touch, all right. “A Sound of Thunder” is great also. Time travel as a concept grabbed my imagination as a child and I still think about it as an adult. Wish for it, some days…..